Photo caption: Schoolgirls at a Turkish-German education primary school on April 14, 2010 in Berlin, Germany. (Andreas Rentz/Getty Images)

BERLIN, Germany — In 2010, Germany will likely experience a small, but unmistakable, crack in the separation between church and state — or, to be more specific, between state and mosque.

Under a plan proposed in February by a national education council, the German government is involving itself in training imams to serve the country's Muslim population. The government has maintained it will have a hand in training thousands of educators to teach Islam in public schools.

Maria Boehmer, Germany's commissioner for integration, calls it “the right signal for integration” to German Muslims.

Those moves would bring Islam closer into alignment with Christianity and Judaism in its dealings with the German government. The country's authorities have long cooperated with representatives of the Catholic and Lutheran churches, as well as with the official institutions of the country's Jewish community, in designing curricula for schools, and subsidizing the education of priests, pastors and rabbis.

By contrast, the country's 4 million Muslims organize their religious affairs independent of — some Germans say, dangerously isolated from — the influence of the state. The recommendations from the education council were motivated by concerns about equal treatment for the country's Muslim minority, but more so by concerns that Germany's hands-off approach with Muslims had hindered their integration into mainstream society.

There's plenty of evidence to support that view. A forthcoming study by Rauf Ceylan, an Islam scholar at Osnabrueck University in western Germany, draws troubling conclusions about Islam's shadow religious economy. Left to their own devices, Germany's Muslims have difficulty finding qualified imams to education their children and guide their spiritual communities.

The main Muslim umbrella organizations that administer Germany's mosques require clerics to have some degree of formal education — unlike the small, independent houses of worship that may sponsor clerics with no theological training at all. But they must find those trained clerics at privately organized centers of Islamic learning that are preponderantly conservative. According to Ceylan's study, only a small minority of German imams are fundamentalists who sympathize with radicals from the Middle East, but significantly more subscribe to interpretations of Islam that place them far outside Germany's ethical norm — and, in some cases, may undermine tenets of the German constitution.

So Muslims have looked outside of Germany for educators. A consistent source for modern-minded, theologically qualified clerics has been Turkey's Ministry of Religion. For more than 20 years, the German government has arranged for thousands of imams selected by the government in Ankara to spend up to four years attending to the spiritual needs of Germany's predominantly ethnically Turkish Muslim community.

But however much it may have helped bolster the leadership of Germany's mosques, the Turkish guest-imam program has stalled Muslim integration into German society.

Is Germany's training of imams a wasted effort? Join the conversation in the comment section below.

According to Ceylan's study, the newly arrived Turkish clerics often can't speak with younger generations of Muslims in their first language, German, and — due to a lack of familiarity with the German social system — have trouble providing counsel on the sorts of pragmatic issues for which their congregations are most often seeking guidance. Coming directly from Turkey, they are under-prepared for the tasks demanded of them in a country where Muslims are in the minority.

There are difficulties, of course, in any German-backed effort to cultivate a home-grown Islam. The recommendations from the national education council call for the creation of three institutes for the training of imams and religion teachers. Curricula and staffing decisions for those institutes are supposed to be made by councils composed of scholars, as well as representatives from Germany's Muslim community. The problem is that German Muslims, unlike German Catholics, Lutherans and Jews, don't entrust a single centralized institution to represent their interests and viewpoints. Before anything else, the diverse voices of the splintered Muslim community will have to come to an agreement on how they want to inform the process.

What's clear is that it would be a wasted effort were German universities to proceed with the development of Islamic theological institutions without the input of German Muslims. German universities have previously proven themselves tone deaf when it comes to creating a dialogue with the Muslim population. Representatives of the Muslim community loudly protested when Muenster University, which already has an Islamic studies institute that trains school teachers, hired a theology professor, Mohammad Kalish, who claimed that the prophet Mohammad might never have existed. The national plan to train imams will have to avoid mistakes of that sort in order to succeed: There's no point, after all, in training imams who can't earn a hearing among the Muslim community.

Indeed, the greatest weakness of the plan may be its assumption that the universities won't have any trouble finding candidates for theology professorships who both meet academic standards of scholarship, while sharing a connection with the spiritual lives of German Muslims. It might have been more helpful had the national educational council suggested where to look.

While you are here...

The work we do has never been more important — whether it’s because of “news” that might not be news at all or healing the deep divides in our country. Now more than ever, we need conversation, perspective and diverse voices. Will you support PRI in our efforts to create a more informed empathetic world?